Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery

2016 Exhibitions Archive

Further Information

Since the foundation in 1990, the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery has presented an innovated program of exhibitions, featuring artwork from the University extensive Art Collection, loaned works as well as new contemporary commissioned works.

The Gallery aims to continually expand its digital archive of past exhibitions.

CHAR SOO

8 October - 10 December 2016

Carriageworks, Adelaide Film Festival, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art and the University of Western Australia present Hossein Valamanesh in collaboration with Nassiem Valamanesh: CHAR SOO, 2015, Produced by Felix Media.

Hossein Valamanesh’s four-screen video projection transports you into the bustling center of an Iranian grand bazaar, enveloping you in its sights and sounds.

Saltwater Mapping

8 October - 10 December 2016

Presented by the Berndt Museum.

The human ability to tell stories and picture the world through mark making provides us with a historical references to place and location today. Saltwater Mapping along Australia’s West Coast is a continuing practice that began long before Europeans arrived, to proclaim ownership, unsettling our lands and shaping our current colonial backdrop.

Saltwater Mapping aims to respond to the 400th anniversary of Dutch explorer Dirk Hartog’s landing in Western Australia with an exploration into the way in which humanity has mapped the WA coastline over the past four centuries.

The exhibition invites audiences to reconsider notions of ownership, place and histories through mapping and practices.

Kelly Doley: Things Learnt About Feminism

8 October - 10 December 2016

Ninety-five hand-painted posters about feminism now.

In 2012 Australian artist Kelly Doley initiated the project The Learning Centre: Two Feminists, inviting 16 participants from different backgrounds to teach her about feminism. Thoughts, facts and ideas from these conversations were translated into 95 hand-painted posters, transforming the live encounter between the artist and participant into an archive of feminist thought and history. Unapologetically contradictory and provocative, Kelly Doley: Things Learnt About Feminism investigates the tropes and cliches of the political poster and celebrates the strength and diversity of feminism today.

Presented by the UWA’s Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, the nation’s only public collection of art by Australian women.

Miriam Stannage: Survey 2006 - 2016

30 July - 24 September 2016

Photographs | Books | Objects

Miriam Stannage: Survey 2006 - 2016 showcases Stannage’s characteristically wry observations of life, and testifies to her ongoing experimentation and innovation across a range of media. The artist utilises everyday objects to offer a commentary on fame, and the fragile and transitory nature of our time on this planet.

Photographs from major series including Elvis and Marilyn (Spirit Photographs), 2009-2010, Paradise Lost, 2008 and her most recent Security Notice series, 2014 - ­2015 will be on display.

Mowaljarlai Vision and VoiceLegacy of a Bush Professor

23 April - 17 September 2016

Honouring the life and legacy of lawman, philosopher, artist, activist, storyteller, bush professor, and statesman, David Mowaljarlai.

Presented by the Berndt Museum

Ngarinyin Lawman Bungal (David) Mowaljarlai, OAM (c.1925-1997) was an artist, philosopher and distinguished advocate for the land rights and culture of the Kimberley Wandjina peoples. Through personality and force of will he guided his people through complex colonial relationships and the momentous changes imposed upon them, including re-settlement hundreds of kilometres away from their Country to Mowanjum, near Derby, in the 1950s.

Through images and sound, the exhibition will introduce audiences to Mowaljarlai?s gift to the world - his extraordinary commitment to communicate with the younger generation and cross-culturally through working partnerships, complex knowledge systems imbued with wisdom, transmitted through eons past, into the future. Visitors will experience a selection of Mowaljarlai?s paintings, drawings and sketches. Along with personal photographs and audio-visual footage in which he features, this will provide an insight into his influence and extensive cultural reach.

HERE&NOW16 / GenYM

30 April - 16 July 2016

A firsthand look at being young and Muslim in modern Australia.

Presenting nine contemporary artists whose otherwise diverse work is tied together by their experiences of being young and Muslim in Australia. The featured artists are (almost) all members of ‘Generation Y’, growing up or migrating to Australia in the 1990s and early 2000s, and their work reflects lives spent living with and challenging a ‘post-9/11’ construction of Muslim identity.

Julie Gough: Collisions

30 April - 16 July 2016

Exploring contact and colonisation with the Cruthers Collection of Women?s Art.

Julie Gough is an acclaimed artist, writer and curator who has participated in over 120 exhibitions since 1994. Collisions features works by Gough that examine points of contact between Australian Indigenous heritage and colonial history, often drawing from her own and her family?s experiences as Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

The central focus of the exhibition will be a video work, Observance. Filmed over three trips to her traditional country on Tasmania?s North East Coast, the work documents her experience in the landscape. During her trips she is interrupted by groups of tourists whom she dubs `the descendants of the colonists? due to their pursuit of a pristine landscape experience `ideally free of people? and historical baggage. The haunting video will be juxtaposed with sculptures and prints that describe other cross-cultural encounters ? less cultural exchanges than collisions.

INTERWOVEN

Thursday 18 February - Saturday 9 April 2016

Via the intertwining of fibre, feather, paper, recycled blankets, string, seeds and other qualitative materials, Interwoven brings to life a series of items created by generations of culturally distinctive makers from Aboriginal Australia, Melanesia and South-east Asian settings.

Bharti Kher: In Her Own Language

Thursday 18 February - Saturday 16 April 2016

In her first solo exhibition in Australia, internationally acclaimed artist Bharti Kher offers a window into her richly textured practice. Her distinctive signature application of saris, bindis and moulded forms is on display in a selection of wall works and sculptures that imply a narrative. Kher’s elegant yet diverse work is visceral and allegorical, stemming from the pulse of her New Delhi studio and informed by a curious and cognisant imperative.

Figurative sculptures resist definition, dancing between mythical goddess and contemporary portraits. Cell-like orbs and ellipses of layered bindis float in fields of colour, suggesting bodily association. Inscribed rice grains invite reflection upon cultural and physical sustenance, social and linguistic attribution. Kher’s language is her own and it has brought her global recognition in the contemporary art world.